China’s Monster Traffic Jam Vanishes

The jam started Aug. 14.

The mammoth traffic jam that left thousands of truckers sitting in gridlock for more than a week has vanished.

China’s state-run media has for days reported that construction and a sudden spike in big-rigs created a traffic jam stretching 62 miles along National Expressway 110. The highway is a major trucking route.

The backup started Aug. 14 and was compounded by breakdowns and crashes. The story made headlines around the world, with news stories popping up as recently as yesterday.

But AFP and MSNBC are reporting the traffic jam has evaporated, just like that. Traffic remains heavy — as many as 17,000 big-rigs use the road through Beijing each day — but it is moving.

“The situation has gotten much better recently. I don’t know why,” a gas station attendant in Huailai county, roughly halfway from the capital to Xinghe county in Inner Mongolia, told AFP. The news service had reporters drive 260 kilometers (about 162 miles) along the road on Wednesday; they found nothing out of the ordinary. Adrienne Mong of MSNBC made the same discovery.

“Virtually overnight, local authorities had managed to disperse the congestion – about 120 miles northwest from Beijing – so by the time we reached the area, all we encountered were the garden-variety traffic jams here and there,” she wrote.

Traffic along the highway is notoriously bad, as it is throughout Beijing, where a recent survey by IBM found the daily commute can be so hellish that seven out of 10 drivers have at some point said “screw this” and returned home. China’s traffic woes have been exacerbated by an explosive growth in auto sales; some 13 million new cars were sold in China last year, making it the world’s biggest automobile market.

No one’s sure how the traffic jam cleared up so quickly, as officials at the Beijing traffic management bureau weren’t available for comment. Mong notes there’s a good chance the gridlock will return because the construction is expected to continue through mid September.